Herbrand-Confluence for Cut Elimination in Classical First Order Logic

Abstract

We consider cut-elimination in the sequent calculus for classical
first-order logic. It is well known that this system, in its most
general form, is neither confluent nor strongly normalizing. In this
work we take a coarser (and mathematically more realistic) look at
cut-free proofs. We analyze which witnesses they choose for which
quantifiers, or in other words: we only consider the
Herbrand-disjunction of a cut-free proof. Our main theorem is a
confluence result for a natural class of proofs: all (possibly
infinitely many) normal forms of the non-erasing reduction lead to the
same Herbrand-disjunction.